Chapter 88: Chapter 88: Soldier Boy (5) (Bonus Chapter)
Extreme heat, absolute cold, photon radiation, telepathic suppression and brutal kinetic force, all focused on a single point.
The ice hissed and boiled, melting and refreezing simultaneously under the conflicting powers of Homelander and Red Three.
The ground beneath Soldier Boy began to liquefy into lava from the sheer energy of the assault.
Inside the boiling prison of ice and steam, Soldier Boy was pushed to his absolute limit.
The psychic pressure from Red Four was agonizing. The heat vision was searing his skin. The kinetic impacts were jarring his bones.
He was taking damage. Real damage. His Tier 1 Regeneration was working in overdrive, healing burns as they appeared, knitting micro fractures in his bones as Maeve and Red One pounded against the ice.
He felt an unfamiliar sensation creeping into his muscles.
Fatigue.
Even with Tier 1 Super Stamina, the concentrated output of the most powerful beings on Earth was forcing him to expend energy faster than his cells could replenish it.
The ice cracked, Homelander’s heat vision finally piercing the outer layer, burning a deep scorch mark across Soldier Boy’s exposed shoulder.
Soldier Boy let out a roar of pain that was muffled by the ice.
"He’s breaking!" Homelander screamed, pushing more energy into his eyes. "Keep hitting him!"
Soldier Boy looked through the distorted ice. He saw Homelander’s manic face. He saw Maeve’s desperate swings. He saw the black armored drones systematically applying force.
Deep within the core of his chest, the radioactive mutation of his biology flared to life.
He took all of his physical strength, all of his stamina and he channeled it inward, feeding the radioactive furnace in his sternum.
A low hum began to vibrate from within the block of ice. It was a sound that bypassed the ears and vibrated directly in the teeth and bones of everyone present.
The ice encasing him began to glow with a blinding green.
"What is that?" Starlight yelled over the shielding her eyes from the intense light.
Homelander stopped his heat vision. He stared at the glowing mass of ice. The hum was growing louder, rising in pitch, turning into a high frequency whine that signaled catastrophic failure.
Homelander recognized that sound. He had heard this sound before in the monitoring room at Vought Tower while reviewing the footage of the Russian base where Soldier Boy had been held before it was destroyed in a nuclear explosion.
Pure terror seized Homelander’s heart. He looked at Maeve, who was still swinging her sword. He looked at Starlight, who was staring in confusion.
Homelander bent his knees and launched himself directly upward, breaking the sound barrier instantly.
He shot into the sky like a rocket, a desperate streak of blue and red fleeing the blast zone at maximum velocity.
Starlight looked up, her jaw dropping as she watched their leader abandon them without a second thought.
"He... he left us," she whispered, her glowing hands dropping to her sides.
Queen Maeve stopped swinging her sword. She leaned heavily on the hilt, her chest heaving as she looked up at the disappearing contrail in the sky.
"Typical," Maeve scoffed, a cynical smile touching her bruised lips. She looked back at the glowing green ice.
Red Two reached out, attempting to grab Red One and Red Three to teleport them clear.
He was a millisecond too late.
Soldier Boy released the lock.
"If you want to die with me," Soldier Boy’s voice boomed from within the ice, distorted and resonant with nuclear power. "Die."
It was the violent expansion of a localized star. A dome of radioactive plasma erupted from Soldier Boy’s chest, instantly vaporizing the ice that held him.
The shockwave hit Red Four first. The telepath, standing thirty feet away, simply ceased to exist, his black armor and the biological matter inside flashing into a shadow burned onto the asphalt before being wiped away entirely.
Red Two, Red One and Red Three were consumed an instant later. The carbon nanotube armor, designed to withstand kinetic impacts, offered zero protection against nuclear vaporization.
The three clones dissolved into ash, their artificial biology breaking down at the atomic level, returning to the gray mist of their creation before being permanently eradicated by the heat.
Starlight screamed, raising her arms in a futile gesture of defense. The blinding green light washed over her.
Her durable skin, which had deflected bullets, blistered and boiled away in a fraction of a second.
She felt a singular moment of blinding agony, a terrifying realization of her own mortality, before her nervous system was incinerated.
The girl from Iowa, who only wanted to save people, turned into a pillar of white hot ash and scattered to the wind.
Queen Maeve stood her ground. As the wall of radioactive plasma rushed toward her, she stared into the blinding light, her grip firm on her sword.
"Fucking finally," she whispered.
The blast consumed her. Her legendary invulnerability held for exactly one tenth of a second longer than the others, her silhouette remaining visible in the blinding light for a heartbreaking moment before her flesh and bone gave way, atomized by the apocalyptic heat.
The blast wave continued outward, expanding in a devastating hemisphere. It vaporized the burning tanks, the concrete bunkers, the asphalt and the remaining corpses of the military personnel.
It scoured the valley floor, turning the earth into a glowing plain of radioactive glass.
And then, as quickly as it had erupted, the energy dissipated, rushing upward into the sky in a massive mushroom cloud of green and black smoke.
Silence returned to the valley.
Thirty thousand feet above the earth, hovering in the freezing air of the stratosphere, Homelander looked down. His chest was heaving, his breathing ragged.
He stared at the glowing crater where the military base used to be. The mushroom cloud was rising toward him, a silent testament to the power of the man he had called father.
He looked for the thermal signatures of Maeve, of Starlight, of the armored soldiers. There was nothing. Just the blinding white heat of the irradiated crater.
They were all dead. The Seven was dead. The Red Unit was dead. Soldier Boy was dead.
Homelander floated in the silence.
